
Class IPi 

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CJOEOUGHI 0£H)Sm 



Cobb^s Bi I /-of- Fare 




Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

By 

Irvin S, Cobb 

Author of 

^^The Escape of Mr, Trimm,^' ^^Back Home,'*'* 

''Cobb' s Anatomy,'*'' etc. 

Illustrated by 
Peter Newell and James Preston 




New York 
George H. L>oran Company 



Copyright, 1911-1912. 
By Thk Curtis Publishing Company 

Copyright, 1913, 
By Gkorgk H. Doran Company 



, (0 i-v'- 



^1 6 



Cobb''s Bill-of-Fare 



To 

R. H. Davis 

(Not Richard Harding— 
The Other One) 



Cobb'^s Bill-of-Fare 



AS FOLLOWS 



PAGE 

I. VlTTLES 13 

II. Music 47 

III. Art .81 

IV. Sport 113 



Cobb^s Bill-of-Fare 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 
''I now greatly desire to eat some regular food." 15 L/ 

''Those who in the goodness of their hearts may 
undertake a search for the sucking pig." 35 !/ 

"Where do you find the percentage of dyspeptics 
running highest ?" 41 \X 

"She tries to tear all its front teeth out with her 
bare hands." 5i v/' 

"Ro-hocked in the cra-hadle of the da-heep, 
I la-hay me down in pe-heace to sa-leep!" 57 i^ 

"Shem undoubtedly sang it when the animals were 
hungry." 61 ^ 

"And I enjoy it more than words can tell!". ... 67^ 

"We looked in vain for the kind of pictures that 
mother used to make and father used to buy." 83 ^^ 

"The inscrutable smile of a saleslady would make 
Mona Lisa seem a mere amateur." 93 ^-^ 

"A person who for reasons best known to the po- 
lice has not been locked up." 97 ^ 



Cobb'^s Bill-of-Fare 



ILL USTRA T IONS— Continued 



PAGE 

''Collision between two heavenly bodies or prema- 
ture explosion of a custard pie." 103 

^'Everything you catch is second-hand." iig 

*'He could beat me climbing, but at panting I had 
him licked to a whisper." 125 v 

**She was not much larger than a soapdish." 137 • 

''Think of being laid face downward firmly across 
a sinewy knee and beaten forty-love with one of 
those hard catgut rackets!" I43 



Cobb^s Bill-of-Fare 



FITTLES 




CobFs Bill-of-Fare 

Vittles 

UPON a certain gladsome occasion a 
certain man went into a certain res- 
taurant in a certain large city, being 
imbued with the idea that he desired a cer- 
tain kind of food. Expense was with him no 
object. The coming of the holidays had 
turned his thoughts backward to the care- 
free days of boyhood and he longed for the 
holidaying provender of his youth with a 
longing that was as wide as a river and as 
deep as a well. 

^^Me, I have tried it all/' he said to him- 
self. ^^I have been down the line on this 
eating proposition from alphabet soup to 
animal crackers. I know the whole thing, 
from the nine-dollar, nine-course banquet, 
with every course bathed freely in the same 
kind of sauce and tasting exactly like all the 
other courses, to the quick lunch, where the 



14 Cobb's Bill'of'Fare 

only difiference between clear soup and beef 
broth is that if you want the beef broth the 
waiter sticks his thumb into the clear soup 
and brings it along. 

^^I have feasted copiously at grand hotels 
where they charge you corkage on your own 
hot-water bottle, and I have dallied frugally 
with the forty-cent table d'hote with wine, 
when the victuals were the product of the 
well-known Sam Brothers — Flot and Jet — 
and the wine tasted like the stuff that was 
left over from graining the woodwork for a 
mahogany finish. 

^^I now greatly desire to eat some regu- 
lar food, and if such a thing be humanly 
possible I should also prefer to eat it in 
silence unbroken except by the noises I make 
myself. I have eaten meals backed up so 
close to the orchestra that the leader and I 
were practically wearing the same pair of 
suspenders. I have been howled at by a 
troupe of Sicilian brigands armed with their 
national weapons — the garlic and the guitar. 
I have been tortured by mechanical pianos 
and automatic melodeons, and I crave quiet. 
But in any event I want food. I cannot 




T^m^^ 



" I NOW GREATLY DESIRE TO EAT 
SOME REGULAR FOOD " 



Cobb^s Bill'of'Fare 17 

spare the time to travel nine hundred miles 
to get it, and I must, therefore, take a chance 
here." 

So, as above stated, he entered this certain 
restaurant and seated himself; and as soon 
as the Hungarian string band had desisted 
from playing an Italian air orchestrated by 
a German composer he got the attention of 
an omnibus, who was Greek, and the bus 
enlisted the assistance of a side waiter, he 
being French, and the side waiter in time 
brought to him the head waiter, regarding 
whom I violate no confidence in stating that 
he was Swiss. The man I have been quoting 
then drew from his pockets a number of 
bank notes and piled them up slowly, one by 
one, alongside his plate. Beholding the de- 
nominations of these bills the head waiter 
with difficulty restrained himself from kiss- 
ing the hungry man upon the bald spot on 
his head. The sight of a large bill inva- 
riably quickens the better nature of a head 
waiter. 

^^Now, then," said the enhungered one, ^^I 
would have speech with you. I desire food 
— food suitable for a free-born American 



18 Cobb's Bill'of-Fare 

Stomach on such a day as this. No, you 
needn't wave that menu at me. I can shut 
my eyes and remember the words and music 
of every menu that ever was printed. I don't 
know what half of it means because I am no 
court interpreter, but I can remember it. I 
can sing it, and if I had my clarinet here I 
could play it. Heave the menu over the side 
of the boat and listen to me. What I want is 
just plain food — food like mother used to 
make and mother's fair-haired boy used to 
eat. We will start off with turkey — turkey 
a la America, understand; turkey that is all 
to the Hail Columbia, Happy Land. With 
it I want some cramberry sauce — no, not 
cranberry, I guess I know it's real name — 
some cramberry sauce; and some mashed 
potatoes — mashed with enthusiasm and 
nothing else, if you can arrange it — and 
some scalloped oysters and maybe a few 
green peas. Likewise I want a large cup of 
coffee right along with these things — not 
served afterward in a misses' and children's 
sized cup, but along with the dinner." 
^^Salad?" suggested the head waiter, re- 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 19 

luctantly withdrawing his fascinated vision 
from the pile of bills. ^^Salad?" he said. 

^^No salad," said the homesick stranger, 
^^not unless you could chop me up some 
lettuce and pow^der it with granulated sugar 
and pour a little vinegar over it and bring it 
in to me with the rest of the grub. Where 
I was raised we always had chewing tobacco 
for the salad course, anyhow." 

The head waiter's whole being recoiled 
from the bare prospect. He seemed on the 
point of swooning, but looked at the money 
and came to. 

^^Dessert?" he added, poising a pencil. 

^Well," said the man reflectively, ^^I don't 
suppose you could fix me up some ambrosia 
— that's sliced oranges with grated cocoanut 
on top. And in this establishment I doubt 
if you know anything about boiled custard, 
with egg kisses bobbing round it and sunken 
reefs of sponge cake underneath. So I guess 
I'd better compromise on some plum pud- 
ding; but mind you, not the imported Eng- 
lish plum pudding. English plum pud- 
ding is not a food, it's a missile, and when 
eaten it is a concealed deadly weapon. I 



20 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

want an American plum pudding. Mark 
well my words — an American plum pud- 
ding. 

^'And/' he concluded, ^4f you can bring 
me these things, just so, without any strange 
African sauces or weird Oriental fixings or 
trans-Atlantic goo stirred into them or 
poured on to them or breathed upon them, I 
shall be very grateful to you, and in addi- 
tion I shall probably make you independ- 
ently wealthy for life.'' 

It was quite evident that the head waiter 
regarded him as a lunatic — perhaps only a 
lunatic in a mild form and undoubtedly one 
cushioned with ready money — but neverthe- 
less a lunatic. Yet he indicated by a stately 
bow that he would do the bjest he could 
under the circumstances, and withdrew to 
take the matter up with the house com- 
mittee. 

^^Now this," said the man, ^^is going to be 
something like. To be sure the table is not 
set right. As T remember how things used 
to look at home there should be a mustache 
cup at Uncle Hiram's plate, so he could 
drink his floating island without getting his 



Cobb's BiU-of-Fare 21 

cream-separators mussy, and there ought to 
be a vinegar cruet at one end and a silver 
cake basket at the other and about nine kinds 
of pickles and jellies scattered round ; and in 
the center of the table there should be a 
winter bouquet — a nice, hard, firm, dark red 
winter bouquet — containing, among other 
things, a sheaf of wheat, a dried cockscomb 
and a couple of oak galls. Yet if the real 
provender is forthcoming I can put up with 
the absence of the proper settings and deco- 
rations." 

He had ample leisure for these thoughts, 
because, as you yourself may have noticed, 
in a large restaurant when you order any- 
thing that is out of the ordinary — which 
m.eans anything that is ordinary — it takes 
time to put the proposition through the 
proper channels. The waiter lays your ap- 
plication before the board of governors, and 
after the board of governors has disposed 
of things coming under the head of unfin- 
ished business and good of the order it takes 
a vote, and if nobody blackballs you the 
treasurer is instructed to draw a warrant and 



22 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

the secretary engrosses appropriate resolu- 
tions, and your order goes to the cook. 

But finally this man's food arrived. And 
he looked at it and sniffed at it daintily — 
like a reluctant patient going under the 
ether — and he tasted of it; and then he put 
his face down in his hands and burst into 
low, poignant moans. For it wasn't the real 
thing at all. The stuffing of the turkey 
defied chemical analysis ; and, moreover, the 
turkey before serving should have been 
dusted with talcum powder and fitted with 
dress-shields, it being plainly a crowning 
work of the art preservative — meaning by 
that the cold-storage packing and pickling 
industry. And if you can believe what Doc- 
tor Wiley says — and if you can't believe the 
man who has dedicated his life to warning 
you against the things which you put in your 
mouth to steal away your membranes, whom 
can you believe? — the cranberry sauce be- 
longed in a paint store and should have been 
labeled Easter-egg dye, and the green peas 
were green with Paris green. 

As for the plum pudding, it was one of 
those burglar-proof, enamel-finished prod- 



Cobb's Bill'of-Fare 23 

ucts that prove the British to be indeed a 
hardy race. And, of course, they hadn't 
brought him his coffee along with his din- 
ner, the management having absolutely re- 
fused to permit of a thing so revolutionary 
and unprecedented and one so calculated to 
upset the whole organization. And at the 
last minute the racial instincts of the cook 
had triumphed over his instructions, and he 
had impartially imbued everything with his 
native brews, gravies, condiments, season- 
ings, scents, preservatives, embalming fluids, 
liquid extracts and perfumeries. So, after 
weeping unrestrainedly for a time, the man 
paid the check, which was enormous, and 
tipped everybody freely and went away in 
despair and, I think, committed suicide on 
an empty stomach. At any rate, he came 
no more. The moral of this fable is, there- 
fore, that it can't be done. 

But why can't it be done? I ask you 
that and pause for a reply. Why can't it be 
done? It is conceded, I take it, that in the 
beginning our cookery was essentially of the 
soil. Of course when our forebears came 
over they brought along with them certain 



24 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

inherent and inherited Old World notions 
touching on the preparation of raw pro- 
vender in order to make it suitable for 
human consumption; but these doubtless 
were soon fused and amalgamated with the 
cooking and eating customs of the original 
or copper-colored inhabitants. The differ- 
ence in environment and climate and condi- 
tions, together with the amplified wealth of 
native supplies, did the rest. In Merrie 
England, as all travelers know, there are but 
three staple vegetables — to wit, boiled pota- 
toes, boiled turnips, and a second helping of 
the boiled potatoes. But here, spread be- 
fore the gladdened vision of the newly 
arrived, and his to pick and choose from, 
was a boundless expanse of new foodstuffs — 
birds, beasts and fishes, fruits, vegetables 
and berries, roots, herbs and sprouts. He 
furnished the demand and the soil was there 
competently with the supply. 

We owe a lot to our red brother. From 
him we derived a knowledge of the values 
and attractions of the succulent clam, and 
he didn't cook a clam so that it tasted like 
O'Somebody's Heels of New Rubber either. 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 25 

From the Indian we got the original idea 
of the shore dinner and the barbecue, the 
planked shad and the hoecake. By follow- 
ing in his footsteps we learned about succo- 
tash and hominy. He conferred upon us 
the inestimable boon of his maize — hence 
corn bread, corn fritters, fried corn and 
roasting ears; also his pumpkin and his 
sweet potato — hence the pumpkin pie of the 
North and its blood brother of the South, 
the sweet-potato pie. From the Indian we 
got the tomato— let some agriculturist cor- 
rect me if I err — though the oldest inhabi- 
tant can still remember when we called it a 
love apple and regarded it as poisonous. 
From him we inherited the crook-neck 
squash and the okra gumbo and the rattle- 
snake watermelon and the wild goose plum, 
and many another delectable thing. 

So, out of all this and from all this our 
ancestors evolved cults of cookery which, 
though they differed perhaps as between 
themselves, were all purely American and 
all absolutely unapproachable. France lent 
a strain to New Orleans cooking and Spain 
did the same for California. Scrapple was 



26 Cobb^s Bill-of-Fare 

Pennsylvania's, terrapin was Maryland's, 
the baked bean was Massachusetts', and 
along with a few other things spoon-bread 
ranked as Kentucky's fairest product. In- 
diana had dishes of which Texas wotted not, 
nor kilowatted either, this being before the 
day of electrical cooking contrivances. Vir- 
ginia, mother of presidents and of natural- 
born cooks, could give and take cookery 
notions from Vermont. Likewise, this con- 
dition developed the greatest collection of 
cooks, white and black alike, that the world 
has ever seen. They were inspired cooks, 
needing no notes, no printed score to guide 
them. They could burn up all the cook- 
books that ever were printed and still cook. 
They cooked by ear. 

And perhaps they still do. If so, may 
Heaven bless and preserve them! Some 
carping critics may contend that our grand- 
fathers and grandmothers lacked the proper 
knowledge of how to serve a meal in courses. 
Let 'em. Let 'em carp until they're as black 
in the face as a German carp. For real food 
never yet needed any vain pomp and cir- 
cumstance to make it attractive. It stands 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 21 

on its own merits, not on the scenic effects. 
When you really have something to eat you 
don't need to worry trying to think up the 
French for napkin. Perhaps there may be 
some among us here on this continent who, 
on beholding a finger-bowl for the first time, 
glanced down into its pellucid depths and 
wondered what had become of the gold fish. 
There may have been a few who needed a 
laprobe drawn up well over the chest when 
eating grapefruit for the first time. Indeed, 
there may have been a few even whose exe- 
cution in regard to consuming soup out of 
the side of the spoon was a thing calculated 
to remind you of a bass tuba player empty- 
ing his instrument at the end of a hard street 
parade. 

But I doubt it. These stories were prob- 
ably the creations of the professional hu- 
morists in the first place. Those who are 
given real food to eat may generally be 
depended upon to do the eating without 
undue noise or excitement. The gross per- 
son featured in the comic papers, who con- 
sumes his food with such careless abandon 
that it is hard to tell whether the front 



28 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

of his vest was originally drygoods or 
groceries, either doesn't exist in real life or 
else never had any food that was worth 
eating, and it didn't make any difference 
whether he put it on the inside of his chest 
or the outside. 

Only a short time ago I saw a whole 
turkey served for a Thanksgiving feast at a 
large restaurant. It vaunted itself as a 
regular turkey and was extensively charged 
for as such on the bill. It wasn't though. 
It was an ancient and a shabby ruin — a 
genuine antique if ever there was one, with 
those high-polished knobs all down the 
front, like an old-fashioned highboy, and 
Chippendale legs. To make up for its 
manifold imperfections the chef back in the 
kitchen had crowded it full of mysterious 
laboratory products and then varnished it 
over with a waterproof glaze or shellac, 
which rendered it durable without making 
it edible. Just to see that turkey w^as a thing 
calculated to set the mind harking backward 
to places and times when there had been real 
turkeys to eat. 

Back yonder in the old days we were a 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 29 

simple and a husky race, weren't we? Boys 
and girls were often fourteen years old* be- 
fore they knew oysters didn't grow in a can. 
Even grown people knew nothing, except by 
vague hearsay, of cheese so runny that if you 
didn't care to eat it you could drink it. 
There was one traveled person then living 
who was reputed to have once gone up to 
the North somewhere and partaken of a 
watermelon that had had a plug cut in it 
and a whole quart of imported real Paris — • 
France — champagne wine poured in the 
plugged place. This, however, was gener- 
ally regarded as a gross exaggeration of the 
real facts. 

But there was a kind of a turkey that they 
used to serve in those parts on high state 
occasions. It was a turkey that in his 
younger days ranged wild in the woods and 
ate the mast. At the frosted coming of the 
fall they penned him up and fed him grain 
to put an edge of fat on his lean; and then 
fate descended upon him and he died the 
ordained death of his kind. But, oh! the 
glorious resurrection when he reached the 
table! You sat with weapons poised and 



30 Cobb's Bill'of-Fare 

ready — a knife in the right hand, a fork in 
the left and a spoon handy — and looked 
upon him and watered at the mouth until 
you had riparian rights. 

His breast had the vast brown fullness 
that you see in pictures of old Flemish 
friars. His legs were like rounded col- 
umns and unadorned, moreover, with those 
superfluous paper frills; and his tail was 
half as big as your hand and it protruded 
grandly, like the rudder of a treasure-ship, 
and had flanges of sizzled richness on it. 
Here was no pindling fowl that had taken 
the veil and lived the cloistered life; here 
was no wiredrawn and trained-down cross- 
country turkey, but a lusty giant of a bird 
that would have been a cassowary, probably, 
or an emu, if he had lived, his bosom a 
white mountain of lusciousness, his interior 
a Golconda and not a Golgotha. At the 
touch of the steel his skin crinkled delicately 
and feU away; his tissues flaked ofif in tender 
strips; and from him arose a bouquet of 
smells more varied and more delectable 
than anything ever turned out by the justly 
celebrated Islands of Spice, It was a sin 



Cobb^^s Bill-of-Fare 31 

to cut him up and a crime to leave him be. 

He had not been stuffed by a taxidermist 
or a curio collector, but by the master hand 
of one of those natural-born home cooks — 
stuffed with corn bread dressing that had 
oysters or chestnuts or pecans stirred into it 
until it was a veritable mine of goodness, 
and this stuffing had caught up and retained 
all the delectable drippings and essences of 
his being, and his flesh had the savor of the 
things upon which he had lived — the sweet 
acorns and beechnuts of the woods, the but- 
tery goobers of the plowed furrows, the 
shattered corn of the horse yard. 

Nor was he a turkey to be eaten by the 
mere slice. At least, nobody ever did eat 
him that way — you ate him by rods, poles 
and perches, by townships and by sections — 
ate him from his neck to his hocks and back 
again, from his throat latch to his crupper, 
from center to circumference, and from pit 
to dome, finding something better all the 
time; and when his frame was mainly de- 
nuded and loomed upon the platter like a 
scaffolding, you dug into his cadaver and 
found there small hidden joys and titbits. 



32 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

You ate until the pressure of your waistband 
stopped your watch and your vest flew open 
like an engine-house door and your stomach 
was pushing you over on your back and 
sitting upon you, and then you half closed 
your eyes and dreamed of cold-sliced turkey 
for supper, turkey hash for breakfast the 
next morning and turkey soup made of the 
bones of his carcass later on. For each state 
of that turkey would be greater than the 
last. 

There still must be such turkeys as this 
one somewhere. Somewhere in this broad 
and favored land, untainted by notions of 
foreign cookery and unvisited by New York 
and Philadelphia people who insist on call- 
ing the waiter garqon, when his name is 
Gabe or Roscoe, there must be spots where 
a turkey is a turkey and not a cold-storage 
corpse. And this being the case, why don't 
those places advertise, so that by the hun- 
dreds and the thousands men who live in 
hotels might come from all over in the 
fall of the year and just naturally eat 
themselves to death? 

Perchance also the sucking pig of the 



Cobb^^s Bill'of'Fare 33 

good old days still prevails in certain shel- 
tered vales and glades. He, too, used to 
have his vogue at holiday times. Because 
the gods did love him he died young — died 
young and tender and unspoiled by the 
world — and then everybody else did love 
him too. For he was barbered twice over 
and shampooed to a gracious pinkiness by 
a skilled hand, and then, being basted, he 
was roasted whole with a smile on his lips 
and an apple in his mouth, and sometimes a 
bow of red ribbon on his tail, and his juices 
from within ran down his smooth flanks and 
burnished him to perfection. His interior 
was crammed with stuff and things and 
truck and articles of that general nature — 
I'm no cooking expert to go into further 
particulars, but whatever the stuffing was, it 
was appropriate and timely and suitable, I 
know that, and there was onion in it and 
savory herbs, and it was exactly what a 
sucking pig needed to bring out all that was 
good and noble in him. 

You began operations by taking a man's- 
size slice out of his midriff, bringing with it 
a couple of pinky little rib bones, and then 



34 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

you ate your way through him and along 
him in either direction or both directions 
until you came out into the open and fell 
back satiated and filled with the sheer joy 
of living, and greased to the eyebrows. I 
should like to ask at this time if there is any 
section where this brand of sucking pig 
remains reasonably common and readily 
available? In these days of light house- 
keeping and kitchenettes and gas stoves and 
electric cookers, is there any oven big 
enough to contain him? Does he still linger 
on or is he now known in his true perfection 
only on the magazine covers and in the 
Christmas stories? 

As a further guide to those who in the 
goodness of their hearts may undertake a 
search for him in his remaining haunts and 
refuges, it should be stated that he was no 
German wild boar, or English pork pie on 
the hoof, and that he was never cooked 
French style, or doctored up with anchovies, 
caviar, marrons glaces, pickled capers out of 
a bottle — where many of the best capers of 
the pickled variety come from — imported 
truffles, Mexican tamales or Hawaiian poi. 




" THOSE ^A^HO IN THE GOODNESS OP THEIR HEARTS 
MAY UNDERTAKE A SEARCH FOR THE SUCKING PIG" 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 37 

He was — and is, if he still exists — just a 
plain little North American baby-shoat 
cooked whole. And don't forget the red 
apple in his mouth. None genuine without 
this trademark. 

But, shucks! what's the use of talking that 
way? Patriotism is not dead and a demo- 
cratic form of government still endures, and 
surely real sucking pigs are still being 
cooked and served whole somewhere this 
very day. And in that same neighborhood, 
if it lies to the eastward, there are cooks who 
know the art of planking a shad in season — 
not the arrangement of the effete East, con- 
sisting of a greased skin wrapped round a 
fine-tooth comb and reposing on a charred 
clapboard — but a real shad; and if it lies 
to the southward one will surely find in the 
same vicinity a possum of a prevalent dark 
brown tint, with sweet potatoes baked under 
him and a certain inimitable, indescribable 
dark rich gravy surrounding him, and on 
the side corn pones — without any sugar in 
them. I think probably the reason why the 
possum doesn't flourish in the North is that 
they insist on tacking an O on to his name, 



38 Cobb's Bi //-of- Fare 

simply because some misguided writer of 
dictionaries ordained it so. A possum is not 
Irish, nor is he Scotch. His name is not 
Opossum, neither is it MacPossum. He 
belongs to an old Southern family and his 
name is just possum. 

Once I saw ostensible 'possum at a French 
restaurant in New York. It was advertised 
as Opossum, Southern style, and it was 
chopped up fine and cooked in a sort of 
casserole efifect, with green peas and carrots 
and various other things mixed in along 
with it. The quivering sensations which 
were felt throughout the South on this occa- 
sion, and which at the time were mistaken 
for earthquake tremors, were really caused 
by so many Southern cooks turning over 
petulantly in their graves. 

Still going on the assumption that the 
turkey and the sucking pig and their kin- 
dred spirits are yet to be found among us or 
among some of us, anyhow, it is only logical 
to assume that the food is not served in 
courses at the ratio of a little of everything 
and not enough of anything, but that it is 
brought on and spread before the company 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 39 

all together and at once — the turkey or the 
pig or the ham or the chickens; the mashed 
potatoes overflowing their receptacle like 
drifted snow; the celery; the scalloped 
oysters in a dish like a crock; the jelly layer 
cake, the fruit cake and Prince of Wales 
cake; and in addition, scattered about hither 
and yon, all the different kinds of preserves 
— pusserves, to use the proper title — includ- 
ing sweet peach pickles dimpled with cloves 
and melting away in their own sweetness, 
and watermelon-rind pickles cut into cubes 
just big enough to make one bite — that is to 
say in cubes about three inches square — and 
the various kinds of jellies — crab-apple, 
currant, grape and quince — quivering in an 
ecstacy as though at their very goodness, and 
casting upon the white cloth where the light 
catches them all the reflected, dancing tints 
of beryl and amethyst, ruby and garnet — 
crown-jewels in the diadem of real food. 

People who eat dinners like this must, by 
the very nature of things, cling also to the 
ancient North American custom of starting 
the day with an amount of regular food 
called collectively a breakfast. This, of 



40 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

course, does not mean what the dweller in 
the city by the seaboard calls a breakfast, 
he knowing no better, poor wretch — a swal- 
low of tea, a bite of a cold baker's roll, a 
plate of gruel mayhap, or pap, and a sticky 
spoonful of the national marmalade of Per- 
fidious Albumen, as the poet has called it, 
followed by a slap at the lower part of the 
face with a napkin and a series of V-shaped 
hiccoughs ensuing all the morning. No, 
indeed. 

In speaking thus of breakfast, I mean a 
real breakfast. If it's in New England 
there'll be doughnuts and pies on the table, 
and not those sickly convict labor pies of 
the city either, with the prison pallor yet 
upon them, but brown, crusty, full-chested 
pies. And if it's down South there will be 
hot waffles and fresh New Orleans mo- 
lasses; and if it's in any section of our coun- 
try, north or south, east or west, such comfits 
and kickshaws as genuine country smoked 
sausage, put up in bags and spiced like 
Araby the Blest, and fresh eggs fried in 
pairs — never less than in pairs — with their 
lovely orbed yolks turned heavenward like 




"WHERE DO YOU FIND THE PERCENTAGE OF DYSPEPTICS 
RUNNING HIGHEST ? " 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 43 

the topaz eyes of beauteous prayerful 
blondes ; and slices of home-cured ham with 
the taste of the hickory smoke and also of 
the original hog delicately blended in them, 
and marbled with fat and lean, like the 
edges of law books; and cornbeef hash, and 
flaky hot biscuits ; and an assortment of those 
same pickles and preserves already men- 
tioned ; the whole being calculated to make 
a hungry man open his mouth until his face 
resembles the general-delivery window at 
the post-office — and sail right in. 

The cry has been raised that American 
cooking is responsible for American dys- 
pepsia, and that as a race we are given to 
pouring pepsin pellets down ourselves be- 
cause of the food our ancestors poured down 
themselves. This is a base calumny. Old 
John J. Calumny himself never coined a 
baser one. You have only to look about you 
to know the truth of the situation, which is, 
that the person with the least digestion is 
the one who always does the most for it, and 
that those who eat the most have the least 
trouble. Where do you find the percentage 
of dyspeptics running highest, in the coun- 



44 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

try or the city? Where do you find the stout 
woman who is banting as she pants and 
panting as she bants? Again, the city. 
Where do you encounter the unhappy male 
creature who has been told that the only 
cure for his dyspepsia is to be a Rebecca at 
the Well and drink a gallon of water before 
each meal and then go without the meal, 
thus compelling him to double in both roles 
and first be Rebecca and then be the Well? 
Where do you see so many of those misera- 
ble ones who have the feeling, after eating, 
that rude hands are tearing the tapestries 
ofT the walls of their respective dining 
rooms? 

Not in the country, where, happily, food 
is perhaps yet food. In the city, that's 
where — in the cities, where they have 
learned to cook food and to serve it and to 
eat it after a fashion different from the 
fashions their grandsires followed. 

That's a noble slogan which has lately 
been promulgated — See America First. But 
while we're doing so wouldn't it be a fine 
idea to try to see some American cooking? 



Cobb'^s Bill-of-Fare 



MUSIC 




Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 



Music 

IF YOU, the reader, are anything like 
me, the writer, it happens to you about 
every once in so long that some well- 
meaning but semi-witted friend rigs a dead- 
fall for you, and traps you and carries you 
off, a helpless captive, for an evening among 
the real music-lovers. 

Catching you, so to speak, with your de- 
fense leveled and your breastworks un- 
manned, he speaks to you substantially as 
follows: ^^Old man, we're going to have a 
few people up to the house tonight — just a 
little informal affair, you understand, with 
a song or two and some music — and the 
missus and I would appreciate it- mightily 
if you'd put on your Young Prince Charm- 
ings and drop in on us along toward eight. 
How about it — can we count on you to be 
among those prominently present?" 



48 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

Forewarned is forearmed, and you know 
all about this person already. You know 
him to be one of the elect in the most ex- 
clusive musical coterie of your fair city, 
wherever your fair city may be. You know 
him to be on terms of the utmost intimacy 
with the works of all the great composers. 
Bill Opus and Jeremiah Fugue have no 
secrets from him — none whatever — and in 
conversation he creates the impression that 
old Issy Sonata was his first cousin. He can 
tell you offhand which one of the Shuberts 
— Lee or Jake — ^^wrote that Serenade. He 
speaks of Mozart and Beethoven in such a 
way a stranger would probably get the idea 
that Mote and Bate used to work for his 
folks. He can go to a musical show, and 
while the performance is going on he can 
tell everybody in his section just which com- 
poser each song number was stolen from, 
humming the original air aloud to show the 
points of resemblance. He can do this, I 
say, and, what is more, he does do it. At 
the table d'hote place, when the Neapolitan 
troubadours come out in their little green 
jackets and their wide red sashes he is right 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 49 

there at the middle table, poised and wait- 
ing; and when they put their heads together 
and lean in toward the center and sing their 
national air, Come Into the Garlic, Maud, 
it is he who beats time for them with his 
handy lead-pencil, only pausing occasion- 
ally to point out errors in technic and execu- 
tion on the part of the performers. He is 
that kind of a pest, and you know it. 

What you should do under these circum- 
stances, after he has invited you to come up 
to his house, would be to look him straight 
in the eye and say to him : ^ Well, old chap, 
that's awfully kind of you to include me in 
your little musical party, and just to show 
you how much I appreciate it and how I 
feel about it here's something for you." And 
then hit him right where his hair parts with 
a cut-glass paperweight or a bronze clock or 
a fire-ax or something, after which you 
should leap madly upon his prostrate form 
and dance on his cozy corner with both feet 
and cave in his inglenook for him. That is 
what you should do, but, being a vacillating 
person — I am still assuming, you see, that 
you are constituted as I am — you weakly 



50 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

surrender and accept the invitation and 
promise to be there promptly on time, and 
he goes away to snare more victims in order 
to have enough to make a mess. 

And so it befalls at the appointed time 
that you deck your form in your after-six- 
P. M. clothes and go up. On the way you 
get full and fuller of dark forebodings at 
every step ; and your worst expectations are 
realized as soon as you enter and are re- 
lieved of your hat by a colored person in 
white gloves, and behold spread before you 
a great horde of those ladies and gentlemen 
whose rapt expressions and general air of 
eager expectancy stamp them as true de- 
votees of whatever is most classical in the 
realm of music. You realize that in such a 
company as this you are no better than a 
rank outsider, and that it behooves you to 
attract as little attention as possible. There 
is nobody else here who will be interested 
in discussing with you whether the Giants 
or the Cubs will finish first next season; no- 
body except you who cares a whoop how In- 
diana will go for president — in fact, most of 
them probably haven't heard that Indiana 




"SHE TRIES TO TEAR ALL ITS FRONT TEETH OUT 
WITH HER BARE HANDS " 



Cobb's Bi //-of- Fare 53 

was thinking of going. Their souls are soar- 
ing among the stars in a rarefied atmosphere 
of culture, and even if you could you 
wouldn't dare venture up that far with 
yours, for fear of being seized by an uncon- 
trollable impulse to leap off and end all, the 
same as some persons are affected when on 
the roof of a tall building. So you back 
into the nearest corner and try to look like 
a part of the furniture — and wait in dumb 
misery. 

Usually you don't have to wait very long. 
These people are beggars for punishment 
and like to start early. It is customary to 
lead off the program with a selection on the 
piano by a distinguished lady graduate of 
somebody-with-an-Italian-name's school of 
piano expression. Under no circumstances 
is it expected that this lady will play any- 
thing that you can understand or that I 
could understand. It would be contrary 
to the ethics of her calling and deeply re- 
pugnant to her artistic temperament to play 
a tune that would sound well on a phono- 
graph record. This would never do. She 
comes forward, stripped for battle, and 



54 Cobb^s Bill'of'Fare 

bows and peels off her gloves and fiddles 
with the piano-stool until she gets it ad- 
justed to suit her, and then she sits down, 
prepared to render an immortal work com- 
posed by one of the old masters who was 
intoxicated at the time. 

She starts gently. She throws her head 
far back and closes her eyes dreamily, and 
hits the keys a soft, dainty little lick — 
tippy-tap! Then leaving a call with the 
night clerk for eight o'clock in the morn- 
ing, she seems to drift off into a peaceful 
slumber, but awakens on the moment and 
hurrying all the way up to the other end of 
Main Street she slams the bass keys a couple 
of hard blows— bumetty-bum! And so it 
goes for quite a long spell after that: Tippy- 
tap! — off to the country for a week-end 
party, Friday to Monday; bumetty-bum! — 
six months elapse between the third and 
fourth acts; tippetty-tip! — two years later; 
dear me, how the old place has changed! 
Biffetty-biff ! Gracious, how time flies, for 
here it is summer again and the flowers are 
all in bloom! You sink farther and farther 
into your chair and debate with yourself 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 55 

whether you ought to run like a coward or 
stay and die like a hero. One of your legs 
goes to sleep and the rest of you envies the 
leg. You can feel your whiskers growing, 
and you begin to itch in two hundred sepa- 
rate places, but can't scratch. 

The strangest thing about it is that those 
round you appear to be enjoying it. Incred- 
ible though it seems, they are apparently 
finding pleasure in this. You can tell that 
they are enjoying themselves because they 
begin to act as real music-lovers always act 
under such circumstances — some put their 
heads on one side and wall up their eyes in 
a kind of dying-calf attitude and listen so 
hard you can hear them listening, and some 
bend over toward their nearest neighbors 
and murmur their rapture. It is all right 
for them to murmur, but if you so much as 
Scrooge your feet, or utter a low, despairing 
moan or anything, they all turn and glare 
at you reproachfully and go ^^Sh!" like a 
collection of steam-heating fixtures. De- 
pend on them to keep you in your place! 

All of a sudden the lady operator comes 
out of her trance. She comes out of it with 



56 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

a violent start, as though she had just been 
bee-stung. She now cuts loose, regardless 
of the piano's intrinsic value and its associa- 
tions to its owners. She skitters her flying 
fingers up and down the instrument from 
one end to the other, producing a sound like 
hailstones falling on a tin roof. She grabs 
the helpless thing by its upper lip and tries 
to tear all its front teeth out with her bare 
hands. She fails in this, and then she goes 
mad from disappointment and in a frenzy 
resorts to her fists. 

As nearly as you are able to gather, a ter- 
rific fire has broken out in one of the most 
congested tenement districts. You can hear 
the engines coming and the hook-and-ladder 
trucks clattering over the cobbles. Ambu- 
lances come, too, clanging their gongs, and 
one of them runs over a dog; and a wall 
falls, burying several victims in the ruin. 
At this juncture persons begin jumping out 
of the top-floor windows, holding cooking 
stoves in their arms, and a team runs away 
and plunges through a plate-glass window 
into a tinware and crockery store. People 
are all running round and shrieking, and the 




RO-HOCKED IN THE CRA-HADLE OF THE DA-HEEP 
I LA-HAY ME DOWN IN PE-HEACE TO SA-LEEP!" 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 59 

dog that was run over is still yelping — he 
wasn't killed outright evidently, but only 
crippled — and several tons of dynamite ex- 
plode in a basement. 

As the crashing reverberations die away 
the lady arises, wan but game, and bows low 
in response to the applause and backs away, 
leaving the wreck of the piano jammed back 
on its haunches and trembling like a leaf in 
every limb. 

All to yourself, off in your little corner, 
you are thinking that surely this has been 
suffering and disaster enough for one even- 
ing and everybody will be willing to go 
away and seek a place of quiet. But no. In 
its demand for fresh horrors this crowd is 
as insatiate as the ancient Romans used to 
be when Nero was giving one of those bene- 
fits at the Colosseum for the fire sufferers of 
his home city. There now advances to the 
platform a somber person of a bass aspect, 
he having a double-yolk face and a three- 
ply chin and a chest like two or three chests. 

You know in advance what the big- 
mouthed black bass is going to sing — there 
is only one regular song for a bass singer to 



60 Cobb's Bill-of'Fare 

sing. From time to time insidious efforts 
have been made to work in songs for basses 
dealing with the love affairs of Bedouins 
and the joys of life down in a coal mine; 
but after all, to a bass singer who really 
values his gift of song and wishes to make 
the most of it, there is but one suitable selec- 
tion, beginning as follows : 

Ro-hocked in the cra-hadle of the da-heep, 
I la-hay me down in pe-heace to sa-leep! 
Collum and pa-heaceful be my sa-leep 
Ro-hocked in the cra-hadle of the da-heep! 

That is the orthodox offering for a bass. 
The basses of the world have always used 
it, I believe, and generally to advantage. 
From what I have been able to ascertain I 
judge that it was first written for use on the 
Ark. Shem sang it probably. If there is 
anything in this doctrine of heredity Ham 
specialized in banjo solos and soft-shoe 
dancing, and Japhet, I take it, was the tenor 
— he certainly had a tenor-sounding kind of 
a name. So it must have been Shem, and 
undoubtedly he sang it when the animals 




"SHEM UNDOUBTEDLY SANG IT 
WHEN THE ANIMALS ^VERE HUNGRY'^ 



CobPs Bill-of-Fare 63 

were hungry, so as to drown out the sounds 
of their roaring. 

So this, his descendant — this chip ofif the 
old cheese, as it were — stands up on the plat- 
form facing you, with his chest well ex- 
tended to show his red suspender straps 
peeping coyly out from the arm openings 
of his vest, and he inserts one hand into his 
bosom, and over and over again he tells you 
that he now contemplates laying himself 
down in peace to sleep — which is more than 
anybody else on the block will be able to 
do; and he rocks you in the cradle of the 
deep until you are as seasick as a cow. You 
could stand that, maybe, if only he wouldn't 
make faces at you while he sings. Some day 
I am going to take the time off to make sci- 
entific research and ascertain why all bass 
singers make faces when they are singing. 
Surely there's some psychological reason for 
this, and if there isn't it should be stopped 
by legislative enactment. 

When Sing-Bad the Sailor has quit rock- 
ing the boat and gone ashore, a female sing- 
er generally obliges and comes off the nest 
after a merry lay, cackling her triumph. 



64 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

Then there is something more of a difficult 
and painful nature on the piano; and nearly 
always, too, there is a large lady wearing a 
low-vamp gown on a high-arch form, who 
in flute-like notes renders one of those 
French ballads that's full of la-las and is 
supposed to be devilish and naughty because 
nobody can understand it. For the finish, 
some person addicted to elocution usually 
recites a poem to piano accompaniment. 
The poem Robert of Sicily is much used for 
these purposes, and whenever I hear it Rob- 
ert invariably has my deepest sympathy and 
so has Sicily. Toward midnight a cold col- 
lation is served, and you recapture your hat 
and escape forth into the starry night, swear- 
ing to yourself that never again will you 
permit yourself to be lured into an orgy of 
the true believers. 

But the next time an invitation comes 
along you will fall again. Anyhow that's 
what I always do, meanwhile raging in- 
wardly and cursing myself for a weak and 
spineless creature, who doesn't know when 
he's well off. Yet I would not be regarded 
as one who is insensible to the charms of 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 65 

music. In its place I like music, if it's the 
kind of music I like. These times, when so 
much of our music is punched out for us by 
machinery like buttonholes and the air vents 
in Swiss cheese, and then is put up in cans 
for the trade like Boston beans and baking- 
powder, nothing gives me more pleasure 
than to drop a nickel in the slot and hear an 
inspiring selection by the author of Alexan- 
der's Ragtime Band. 

I am also partial to band music. When 
John Philip Sousa comes to town you can 
find me down in the very front row. I 
appreciate John Philip Sousa when he faces 
me and shows me that breast full of medals 
extending from the whiskerline to the belt- 
line, and I appreciate him still more when 
he turns round and gives me a look at that 
back of his. Since Colonel W. F. Cody 
practically retired and Miss Mary Garden 
went away to Europe, I know of no public 
back which for inherent grace and poetry 
of spinal motion can quite compare with 
Mr. Sousa's. 

I am in my element then. I do not care 
so very much for Home, Sweet Home, as 



66 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

rendered with so many variations that it's 
almost impossible to recognize the old place 
any more ; but when they switch to a march, 
a regular Sousa march full of um-pahs, then 
I begin to spread myself. A little tingle of 
anticipatory joy runs through me as Mr. 
Sousa advances to the footlights and first 
waves his baton at the great big German 
who plays the little shiny thing that looks 
like a hypodermic and sounds like stepping 
on the cat, and then turns the other way and 
waves it at the little bit of a German who 
plays the big thing that looks like a venti- 
lator ofif an ocean liner and sounds like feed- 
ing-time at the zoo. And then he makes the 
invitation general and calls up the brasses 
and the drums and the woods and the wood- 
winds, and also the thunders and the light- 
nings and the cyclones and the earthquakes. 
And three or four of the trombonists pull 
the slides away out and let go full steam 
right in my face, with a blast that blows my 
hair out by the roots, and all hands join in 
and make so much noise that you can't hear 
the music. And I enjoy it more than words 
can tell! 




"AND I ENJOY IT 
MORE THAN ^VORDS CAN TELL!" 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 69 

On the other hand, grand wopra does not 
appeal to me. I can enthuse over the robin's 
song in the spring, and the sound of the sum- 
mer wind rippling through the ripened 
wheat is not without its attractions for me; 
but when I hear people going into convul- 
sions of joy over Signor Massacre's immor- 
tal opera of Medulla Oblongata I feel that 
I am out of my element and I start back- 
pedaling. Lucy D. Lammermore may have 
been a lovely person, but to hear a lot of 
foreigners singing about her for three hours 
on a stretch does not appeal to me. I have 
a better use for my little two dollars. For 
that amount I can go to a good minstrel 
show and sit in a box. 

You may recall when Strauss' Elektra was 
creating such a furor in this country a 
couple of years ago. All the people you 
met were talking about it whether they 
knew anything about it or not, as generally 
they didn't. I caught the disease myself; 
I went to hear it sung. 

I only lasted a little while — I confess it 
unabashedly — if there is such a word as 
unabashedly — and if there isn't then I con- 



10 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

f ess it unashamedly. As well as a mere lay- 
man could gather from the opening pro- 
ceedings, this opera of Elektra was what 
the life story of the Bender family of Kan- 
sas would be if set to music by Fire-Chief 
Croker. In the quieter moments of the ac- 
tion, when nobody was being put out of the 
way, half of the chorus assembled on one 
side of the stage and imitated the last rav- 
ings of John McCuUough, and the other 
half went over on the other side of the stage 
and clubbed in and imitated Wallace, the 
Untamable Lion, while the orchestra, to 
show its impartiality, imitated something 
else — Old Home Week in a boiler factory, 
I think. It moved me strangely — strangely 
and also rapidly. 

Taking advantage of one of these periods 
of comparative calm I arose and softly stole 
away. I put a dummy in my place to de- 
ceive the turnkeys and I found a door provi- 
dentially unlocked and I escaped out into 
the night. Three or four thousand automo- 
biles were charging up and down Broad- 
way, and there was a fire going on a couple 
of blocks up the street, and I think a suf- 



Cobb's Bi //-of- Fare 71 

fragette procession was passing, too; but 
after what Fd just been through the quiet 
was very soothing to my eardrums. I don't 
know when IVe enjoyed anything more 
than the last part of Elektra, that I didn't 
hear. 

Yet my reader should not argue from this 
admission that I am deaf to the charms of 
the human voice when raised in song. Un- 
naturalized aliens of a beefy aspect vocaliz- 
ing in a strange tongue while an orchestra 
of two hundreds pieces performs — that, I 
admit, is not for me. But just let a pretty 
girl in a white dress with a flower in her 
hair come out on a stage, and let her 
have nice clear eyes and a big wholesome- 
looking mouth, and let her open that mouth 
and show a double row of white teeth that'd 
remind you of the first roasting ear of the 
season — just let her be all that and do all 
that, and then let her look right at me and 
sing The Last Rose of Summer or Annie 
Laurie or Believe Me, If All Those En- 
dearing Young Charms — and I am hers to 
command, world without end, forever and 
ever, amen! My eyes cloud up for a rainy 



12 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

Spell, and in my throat there comes a lump 
so big I feel like a coach-whip snake that 
has inadvertently swallowed a china darn- 
ing-egg. And when she is through I am 
the person sitting in the second row down 
front who applauds until the flooring gives 
way and the plastering is jarred loose on the 
next floor. She can sing for me by the hour 
and I'll sit there by the hour and listen to 
her, and forget that there ever was such a 
person in the whole world as the late Vog- 
ner! That's the kind of a music-lover I 
am, and I suspect, if the truth were known, 
there are a whole lot more just like me. 

If I may be excused for getting sort of 
personal and reminiscent at this point I 
should like to make brief mention here of 
the finest music I ever heard. As it hap- 
pened this was instrumental music. I had 
come to New York with a view to revolu- 
tionizing metropolitan journalism, and jour- 
nalism had shown a reluctance amounting to 
positive diffidence about coming forward 
and being revolutionized. Pending the time 
when it should see fit to do so, I was stop- 
ping at a boarding house on West Fifty- 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 13 

Seventh Street. It has been my observation 
that practically everybody who comes to 
New York stops for a while in a boarding 
house on West Fifty-Seventh Street. 

West Fifty-Seventh Street was where I 
was established, in a hall bedroom on the 
top floor — a hall bedroom so form-fitting 
and cozy that when I went to bed I always 
opened the transom to prevent a feeling of 
closeness across the chest. If I had as many 
as three callers in my room of an evening 
and one of them got up to go first, the others 
had to sit quietly while he was picking out 
his own legs. But up to the time I speak 
of I hadn't had any callers. I hadn't been 
there very long and I hadn't met any of the 
other boarders socially, except at the table. 
I had only what you might call a feeding 
acquaintance with them. 

Christmas Eve came round. I was a 
thousand miles from home and felt a mil- 
lion. I shouldn't be surprised if I was a 
little bit homesick. Anyhow it was Christ- 
mas Eve, and it was snowing outside accord- 
ing to the orthodox Christmas Eve formula, 
and upward of five million other people in 



14 Cobb's Bill-ofFare 

New York were getting ready for Christ- 
mas without my company, co-operation or 
assistance. You'd be surprised to know how 
lonesome you can feel in the midst of five 
million people — until you try it on a Christ- 
mas Eve. 

After dinner I wxnt up to my room and 
sat down with my back against the door and 
my feet on the window-ledge, and I rested 
one elbow in the washpitcher and put one 
knee on the mantel and tried to read the 
newspapers. The first thing I struck was 
a Christmas poem, a sentimental Christmas 
poem, full of allusions to the family circle, 
and the old homestead, and the stockings 
hanging by the fireplace, and all that sort 
of thing. 

That was enough. I put on my hat and 
overcoat and went down into the street. The 
snow was coming down in long, slanting 
lines and the sidewalks were all white, and 
where the lamplight shone on them they 
looked like the frosting on birthday cakes. 
People laden with bundles were diving in 
and out of all the shops. Every other shop 
window had a holly wreath hung in it, and 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 75 

when the doors were opened those spicy 
Christmassy smells of green hemlock and 
pine came gushing out in my face. 

So far as I could tell, everybody in New 
York — except me — was buying something 
for his or her or some other body's Christ- 
mas. It was a tolerably lonesome sensation. 
I walked two blocks, loitering sometimes in 
front of a store. Nobody spoke to me ex- 
cept a policeman. He told me to keep mov- 
ing. Finally I went into a little family 
liquor store. Strangely enough, consider- 
ing the season, there was nobody there ex- 
cept the proprietor. He was reading a 
German newspaper behind the bar. I con- 
ferred with him concerning the advisability 
of an egg-nog. He had never heard of such 
a thing as an egg-nog. I mentioned two old 
friends of mine, named Tom and Jerry, 
respectively, and he didn't know them 
either. So I compromised on a hot lemon 
toddy. The lemon was one that had grown 
up with him in the liquor business, I think, 
and it wasn't what you would call a spec- 
tacular success as a hot toddy; but it was 
warming, anyhow, and that helped. I 



16 Cobb's Bill'of-Fare 

expanded a trifle. I asked him whether he 
wouldn't take something on me. 

He took a small glass of beer! He was a 
foreigner and he probably knew no better, 
so I suppose I shouldn't have judged him 
too harshly. But it was Christmas Eve and 
snowing outside — and he took a small beer! 

I paid him and came away. I went back 
to my hall bedroom up on the top floor and 
sat down at the window with my face 
against the pane, like Little Maggie in the 
poem. 

By now the pavements were two inches 
deep in whiteness and in the circle of light 
around an electric lamp up at the corner of 
Ninth Avenue I could see, dimly, the thick, 
whirling white flakes chasing one another 
about madly, playing a Chrismas game of 
their own. Across the way foot-passen- 
gers were still passing in a straggly stream. 
I heard the flat clatter of feet upon the 
stairs outside, heard someone wish some- 
body else a Merry Christmas, and heard 
the other person grunt in a non-committal 
sort of way. There was the sound of a hall 
door slamming somewhere on my floor. 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 77 

After that there was silence — the kind of 
silence that you can break ofif in chunks and 
taste. 

It continued to snow. I reckon I must 
have sat there an hour or more. 

Down in the street four stories below I 
heard something — music. I raised the sash 
and looked out. An Italian had halted in 
front of the boarding house with a grind 
organ and he was turning the crank and the 
thing was playing. It wasn't much of a 
grind organ as grind organs go. I judge it 
must have been the original grind organ 
that played with Booth and Barrett. It had 
lost a lot of its most important works, and it 
had the asthma and the heaves and one 
thing and another the matter with it. 

But the tune it was playing was My Old 
Kentucky Home — and Kentucky was where 
I'd come from. The Italian played it 
through twice, once on his own hook and 
once because I went downstairs and divided 
my money with him. 

I regard that as the finest music I ever 
heard. 

As I was saying before, the classical stuff 



18 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

may do for those who like it well enough to 
stand it, but the domestic article suits me. 
I like the kind of beer that this man Bach 
turned out in the spring of the year, but I 
don't seem to be able to care much for his 
music. And so far as Chopin is concerned, 
I hope you'll all do your Christmas Chopin 
early. 



CobPs Bill-of-Fare 



ART 





Cobb's Bil/'of-Fare 



Art 

IN ART as in music I am one who is very 
easily satisfied. All I ask of a picture is 
that it shall look like something, and all 
I expect of music is that it shall sound like 
something. 

In this attitude I feel confident that I am 
one of a group of about seventy million 
people in this country, more or less, but only 
a few of us, a very heroic few of us, have the 
nerve to come right out and take a firm posi- 
tion and publicly express our true senti- 
ments on these important subjects. Some 
are under the dominion of strong-minded 
wives. Some hesitate to reveal their true 
artistic leanings for fear of being called 
low-browed vulgarians. Some are plastic 
posers and so pretend to be something they 
are not to win the approval of the ultra- 
intellectuals. There are only a handful of 



82 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

US who are ready and willing to go on rec- 
ord as saying where we stand. 

It is because of this cowardice on the part 
of the great silent majority that every year 
sees us backed farther and farther into a 
corner. We walk through miles and miles 
of galleries, or else we are led through them 
by our wives and our friends, and we look 
in vain for the kind of pictures that mother 
used to make and father used to buy. What 
do we find? Once in a while we behold a 
picture of something that we can recognize 
without a chart, and it looms before our 
gladdened vision like a rock-and-rye in a 
weary land. But that is not apt to happen 
often — not in a 1912-model gallery. In 
such an establishment one is likely to meet 
only Old Masters and Young Messers. If 
it's an Old Master we probably behold a 
Flemish saint or a German saint or an Ital- 
ian saint — depending on whether the artist 
was Flemish or German or Italian — de- 
picted as being shot full of arrows and en- 
joying same to the uttermost. If it is a 
Young Messer the canvas probably presents 
to us a view of a poached egg apparently 




""WE LOOKED IN VAIN FOR THE KIND OP PICTURES 

THAT MOTHER USED TO MAKE AND FATHER USED TO BUY ' 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 85 

bursting into a Welsh rarebit. At least that 
is what it looks like to us — a golden buck, 
forty cents at any good restaurant — in the 
act of undergoing spontaneous combustion. 
But we are informed that this is an impres- 
sionistic interpretation of a sunset at sea, and 
we are expected to stand before it and carry 
on regardless. 

But I for one must positively decline to 
carry on. This sort of thing does not appeal 
to me. I don't want to have to consult the 
official catalogue in order to ascertain for 
sure whether this year's prize picture is a 
quick lunch or an Italian gloaming. I'm 
very peculiar that way. I like to be able to 
tell what a picture aims to represent just by 
looking at it. I presume this is the result of 
my early training. I date back to the 
Rutherford B. Hayes School of Interior 
Decorating. In a considerable degree I am 
still wedded to my early ideals. I distinctly 
recall the time when upon the walls of every 
wealthy home of America there hung, 
among other things, two staple oil paintings 
— a still-life for the dining room, showing a 
dead fish on a plate, and a pastoral for the 



86 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

parlor, showing a collection of cows drink- 
ing out of a purling brook. A dead fish with 
a glazed eye and a cold clammy fin was not 
a thing you would care to have around the 
house for any considerable period of time, 
except in a picture, and the same was true of 
cows. People who could not abide the idea 
of a cow in the kitchen gladly welcomed 
one into the parlor when painted in connec- 
tion with the above purling brook and sev- 
eral shade trees. 

Those who could not afford oil paintings 
went in for steel engravings and chromos — 
good reliable brands, such as the steel en- 
graving of Henry Clay's Farewell to the 
American Senate and the Teaching Baby to 
Waltz art chromo. War pictures were also 
very popular back in that period. If it 
were a Northern household you could be 
pretty sure of seeing a work entitled Gettys- 
burg, showing three Union soldiers, two 
plain and one colored, in the act of repuls- 
ing Pickett's charge. If it were a Southern 
household there would be one that had been 
sold on subscription by a strictly non-parti- 
san publishing house in Charleston, South 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 81 

Carolina, and guaranteed to be historically 
correct in all particulars, representing Rob- 
ert E. Lee chasing U. S. Grant up a pal- 
metto tree, while in the background were a 
large number of deceased Northern invad- 
ers neatly racked up like cordwood. 

Such things as these were a part of the 
art education of our early youth. Along 
with them we learned to value the family 
photograph album, which fastened with a 
latch like a henhouse door, and had a nap 
on it like a furred tongue, and contained, 
among other treasures, the photograph of 
our Uncle Hiram wearing his annual collar. 

And there were also enlarged crayon por- 
traits in heavy gold frames with red plush 
insertions, the agent having thrown in the 
portraits in consideration of our taking the 
frames; and souvenirs of the Philadelphia 
Centennial ; and w^ooden scoop shovels heav- 
ily gilded by hand with moss roses painted 
on the scoop part and blue ribbon bows to 
hang them up by; and on the what-not in 
the corner you were reasonably certain of 
finding a conch shell with the Lord's Prayer 
engraved on it; and if you held the shell up 



.VcV Cohh's Bill-of-Fare 

to your young ear you could hear the mur- 
mur of the sea just as plain as anything. Of 
course you could secure the same murmur- 
ing effect by holding an old-fashioned tin 
cuspidor up to your ear, too, but in this case 
the poetic effect would have been lacking. 
And, besides, there were other uses for the 
cuspidor. 

Almost the only Old Masters with whose 
works we were well acquainted were John 
L. Sullivan and Nonpareil Jack Dempsey. 
But Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair suited us 
clear down to the ground — her horses 
looked like real horses, even if they were the 
kind that haul brewery wagons; and in the 
matter of sculpture Powers' Greek Slave 
seemed to fill the bill to the satisfaction of 
all. Anthony Comstock and the Boston 
Purity League had not taken charge of our 
art as yet, and nobody seemed to find any 
fault because the Greek lady looked as 
though she'd slipped on the top step and 
come down just as she was, wearing nothing 
to speak of except a pair of handcuffs. No- 
body did speak of it either — not in a mixed 
company anyhow. 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 89 

Furniture was preferred when it was new 
— the newer -the better. We went in for 
golden oak and for bird's eye maple, de- 
pending on whether we liked our furniture 
to look tanned or freckled; and when the 
careful housekeeper threw open her parlor 
for a social occasion, such as a funeral, the 
furniture gave ofif a splendid new sticky 
smell, similar to a paint and varnish 
store on a hot day. The vogue for antiques 
hadn't got started yet; that was to de- 
scend upon us later on. We rather liked 
the dining-room table to have all its legs 
still, and the bureau to have drawers that 
could be opened without blasting. In 
short, that was the period of our national 
life when only the very poor had to put up 
with decrepit second-hand furi^iture, as op- 
posed to these times when only the very rich 
can afiford to own it. If you have any doubts 
regarding this last assertion of mine I 
should advise you to drop into any reliable 
antique shop and inquire the price of a ma- 
hogany sideboard suffering from tetter and 
other skin diseases, or a black walnut cup- 
board with doors that froze up solid about 



90 Cobb's Bi //-of- Fare 

the time of the last Seminole War. I sup- 
pose these things go in cycles — in fact, Fm 
sure they do. Some day the bare sight of 
the kind of furniture which most people 
favor nowadays will cause a person of artis- 
tic sensibilities to burst into tears, just as the 
memory of the things that everybody liked 
twenty-five or thirty years ago gives such 
poignant pain to so many at present. 

Even up to the time of the World's Fair 
quite a lot of people still favored the sim- 
pler and more understandable forms of art 
expression. We went to Chicago and reli- 
giously visited the Art Building, and in our 
nice new creaky shoes we walked past miles 
and miles of brought-on paintings by for- 
eign artists, whose names we could not pro- 
nounce, in order to find some sentimental 
domestic subject. After we had found it 
we would stand in front of it for hours on a 
stretch with the tears rolling down our 
cheeks. Some of us wept because the spirit 
of the picture moved us, and some because 
our poor tired feet hurt us and the picture 
gave us a good excuse for crying in public, 
and so we did so — freely and openly. 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 91 

Grant if you will that our taste was crude 
and raw and provincial, yet we knew what 
we liked and the bulk of us weren't ashamed 
to say so, either. What we liked was a pic- 
ture or a statue which remotely at least re- 
sembled the thing that it was presumed to 
represent. Likewise we preferred pictures 
of things that we ourselves knew about and 
could understand. 

Maybe it was because of that early train- 
ing that a good many of us have never yet 
been able to work up much enthusiasm over 
the Old Masters. Mind you, we have no 
quarrel with those who become incoherent 
and babbling with joy in the presence of 
an Old Master, but — doggone 'em! — they 
insist on quarreling with us because we 
think differently. We fail to see anything 
ravishingly beautiful in a faded, blistered, 
cracked, crumbling painting of an early 
Christian martyr on a grill, happily frying 
on one side like an egg — a picture that looks 
as though the Old Master painted it some 
morning before breakfast, when he wasn't 
feeling the best in the world, and then wore 
it as a liver pad for forty or fifty years. We 



92 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

cannot understand why they love the Old 
Masters so, and they cannot understand why 
we prefer the picture of Custer's Last Stand 
that the harvesting company used to give 
away to advertise its mowing machines. 

Once you get away from the early settlers 
among the Old Masters the situation be- 
comes different. Rembrandt and Hals 
painted some portraits that appeal deeply 
to the imagination of nearly all of my set. 
The portraits which they painted not only 
looked like regular persons, but so far as my 
limited powers of observation go, they were 
among the few painters of Dutch subjects 
who didn't always paint a windmill or two 
into the background. It probably took 
great resolution and self-restraint, but they 
did it and I respect them for it. 

I may say that I am also drawn to the 
kind of ladies that Gainsborough and Sir 
Joshua Reynolds painted. They certainly 
turned out some mighty good-looking ladies 
in those days, and they were tasty dressers, 
too, and I enjoy looking at their pictures. 
Coming down the line a little farther, I 
want to state that there is also something 




THE INSCRUTABLE SMILE OF A SALESLADY 
WOULD MAKE MONA LISA SEEM A MERE AMATEUR ' 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 95 

very fascinating in those soft-boiled pink 
ladies, sixteen hands high, with sorrel 
manes, that Bouguereau did; and the soldier 
pictures of Meissonier and Detaille appeal 
to me mightily. Their soldiers are always 
such nice neat soldiers, and they never 
have their uniforms mussed up or their 
accouterments disarranged, even when they 
are being shot up or cut down or something. 
Corot and Rousseau did some landscapes 
that seem to approximate the real thing, and 
there are several others whose names escape 
me; but, speaking for myself alone, I wish 
to say that this is about as far as I can go at 
this writing. I must admit that I have 
never been held spellbound and enthralled 
for hours on a stretch by a contemplation of 
the inscrutable smile on Mona Lisa. To 
me she seems merely a lady smiling about 
something — simply that and nothing more. 
Any woman can smile inscrutably; that is 
one of the specialties of the sex. The in- 
scrutable smile of a saleslady in an exclusive 
Fifth Avenue shop when a customer asks to 
look at something a little cheaper would 
make Mona Lisa seem a mere amateur as 



96 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

an inscrutable smiler. Quite a number of 
us remained perfectly calm when some gen- 
tlemen stole Miss Lisa out of the Louvre, 
and we expect to remain equally calm if she 
is never restored. 

As I said before, our little band is shrink- 
ing in numbers day by day. The popula- 
tion as a whole are being educated up to 
higher ideals in art. On the wings of sym- 
bolism and idealism they are soaring ever 
higher and higher, until a whole lot of them 
must be getting dizzy in the head by now. 

First, there was the impressionistic 
school, which started it; and then there was 
the post-impressionistic school, suffering 
from the same disease but in a more violent 
form; and here just recently there have 
come along the Cubists and the Futurists. 

You know about the Cubists? A Cubist 
is a person who for reasons best known to 
the police has not been locked up yet, who 
asserts that all things in Nature, living and 
inanimate, properly resolve themselves into 
cubes. What is more, he goes and paints 
pictures to prove it — pictures of cubic 
waterfalls pouring down cubic precipices, 




" A PERSON WHO FOR REASONS BEST KNOAVN 
TO THE POLICE HAS NOT BEEN LOCKED UP" 



Cobb's Bi //-of Fare 99 

and cubic ships sailing on cubic oceans, and 
cubic cows being milked by cubic milk- 
maids. He makes portraits, too — portraits 
of persons with cubic hands and cubic feet, 
who are smoking cubeb cigarettes and have 
solid cubiform heads. On that last propo- 
sition we are with them unanimously; we 
will concede that there are people in this 
world with cube-shaped heads, they being 
the people who profess to enjoy this style 
of picture. 

A Futurist begins right where a Cubist 
leaves off, and gets worse. The Futurists 
have already had exhibitions in Paris and 
London and last Spring they invaded New 
York. They call themselves art anarchists. 
Their doctrine is a simple and a cheerful 
one — they merely preach that whatever is 
normal is wrong. They not only preach it, 
they practice it. 

Here are some of their teachings: 

^^We teach the plunge into shadowy death 
under the white set eyes of the ideal! 

^^The mind must launch the flaming 
body, like a fire-ship, against the enemy, the 



100 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

eternal enemy that, if he do not exist, must 
be invented! 

^^The victory is ours — I am sure of it, for 
the maniacs are already hurling their hearts 
to heaven like bombs! Attention! Fire! 
Our blood? Yes! All our blood in tor- 
rents to redye the sickly auroras of the 
earth! Yes, and we shall also be able to 
warm thee within our smoking arms, O 
wretched, decrepit, chilly Sun, shivering 
upon the summit of the Gorisankor!" 

There you have the whole thing, you see, 
simply, dispassionately and quietly pre- 
sented. Most of us have seen newspaper 
reproductions of the best examples of the 
Futurists' school. As well as a body can 
judge from these reproductions, a Futurist's 
method of execution must be comparatively 
simple. After looking at his picture, you 
would say that he first put on a woolly over- 
coat and a pair of overshoes; that he then 
poured a mixture of hearth paint, tomato 
catsup, liquid bluing, burnt cork, English 
mustard, Easter dyes and the yolks of a 
dozen eggs over himself, seasoning to taste 
with red peppers. Then he spread a large 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 101 

tarpaulin on the floor and lay down on it 
and had an epileptic fit, the result being a 
picture which he labeled Revolt, or Colli- 
sion Between Two Heavenly Bodies, or 
Premature Explosion of a Custard Pie, or 
something else equally appropriate. The 
Futurists ought to make quite a number of 
converts in this country, especially among 
those advanced lovers of art who are begin- 
ning to realize that the old impressionistic 
school lacked emphasis and individuality in 
its work. But I expect to stand firm, and 
when everybody else nearly is a Futurist 
and is tearing down Sargent's pictures and 
Abbey's and Whistler's to make room for 
immortal Young Messers, I and a few 
others will still be holding out resolutely 
to the end. 

At such times as these I fain would send 
my thoughts back longingly to an artist who 
flourished in the town where I was born and 
brought up. He was practically the only 
artist we had, but he was versatile in the ex- 
treme. He was several kinds of a painter 
rolled into one — house, sign, portrait, land- 
scape, marine and wagon. In his lighter 



102 Cobb's Btll-of-Fare 

hours, when building operations were dull, 
he specialized in oil paintings of life and 
motion — mainly pictures of horse races and 
steamboat races. When he painted a horse 
race, the horses were always shown running 
neck and neck with their mouths wide open 
and their eyes gleaming; and their nostrils 
were widely extended and painted a deep 
crimson, and their legs were neatly arranged 
just so, and not scrambled together in any 
old fashion, as seems to be the case with the 
legs of the horses that are being painted 
nowadays. And when he painted a steam- 
boat race it would always be the Natchez 
and the Robert E. Lee coming down the 
river abreast in the middle of the night, 
with the darkies dancing on the lower decks 
and heavy black smoke rolling out of the 
smokestacks in four distinct columns — one 
column to each smokestack — and showers of 
sparks belching up into the vault of night. 
There was action for you — action and at- 
tention to detail. With this man's paintings 
you could tell a horse from a steamboat at 
a glance. He was nothing of an impres- 
sionist; he never put smokestacks on the 




"COLLISION BETWEEN TWO HEAVENLY BODIES 
OR PREMATURE EXPLOSION OF A CUSTARD PIE " 



CobPs Bill-of-Fare 105 

horse nor legs on the steamboat. And his 
work gave general satisfaction throughout 
that community. 

Frederic Remington wasn't any impres- 
sionist either; and so far as I can learn he 
didn't have a cubiform idea in stock. When 
Remington painted an Indian on a pony it 
was a regular Indian and a regular pony — 
not one of those cotton-batting things with 
fat legs that an impressionist slaps on to a 
canvas and labels a horse. You could smell 
the lathered sweat on the pony's hide and 
feel the dust of the dry prairie tickling your 
nostrils. You could see the slide of the 
horse's withers and watch the play of the 
naked Indian's arm muscles. I should like 
to enroll as a charter member of a league of 
Americans who believe that Frederic Rem- 
ington and Howard Pyle were greater 
painters than any Old Master that ever 
turned out blistered saints and fly-blown 
cherubim. And if every one who secretly 
thinks the same way about it would only 
join in — of coyrse they wouldn't, but if they 
would — we'd be strong enough to elect a 
president on a platform calling for a pro- 



106 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

hibitive tariff against the foreign-pauper- 
labor Old Masters of Europe. 

While we were about it our league could 
probably do something in the interests of 
sculpture. It is apparent to any fair-minded 
person that sculpture has been very much 
overdone in this country. It seems to us 
there should be a law against perpetuating 
any of our great men in marble or bronze or 
stone or amalgam fillings until after he has 
been dead a couple of hundred years, and 
by that time a fresh crop ought to be coming 
on and probably we shall have lost the de- 
sire to create such statues. 

A great man who cannot live in the affec- 
tionate and grateful memories of his fellow 
countrymen isn't liable to live if you put up 
statues of him; that, however, is not the 
main point. 

The artistic aspect is the thing to consider. 
So few of our great men have been really 
pretty to look at. Andrew Jackson made a 
considerable dent in the history of his per- 
iod, but when it comes to beauty, there isn't 
a floor-walker in a department store any- 
where that hasn't got him backed clear off 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 107 

the pedestal. In addition to that, the sort 
of clothes weVe been wearing for the last 
century or so do not show up especially well 
in marble. Putting classical draperies on 
our departed solons has been tried, but carv- 
ing a statesman with only a towel draped 
over him, like a Roman senator coming out 
of a Turkish bath, is a departure from the 
real facts and must be embarrassing to his 
shade. The greatest celebrities were ever 
the most modest of men. TU bet the spirit 
of the Father of His Country blushes every 
time he flits over that statue of himself 
alongside the Gapitol at Washington — the 
one showing him sitting in a bath cabinet 
with nothing on but a sheet. 

Sticking to the actual conditions doesn't 
seem to help much either. Future genera^ 
tions will come and stand in front of the 
statue of a leader of thought who flourished 
back about 1840, say,* and wonder how any- 
body ever had feet like those and lived. 
Horace Greeley's chin whiskers no doubt 
looked all right on Horace when he was 
alive, but when done in bronze they invar- 
iably present a droopy not to say dropsical 



108 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

appearance; and the kind of bone-handled 
umbrella that Daniel Webster habitually 
carried has never yet been successfully 
worked out in marble. When you contem- 
plate the average statue of Lincoln — and 
most of them, as you may have noticed, are 
very average — you do not see there the 
majesty and the grandeur and the abiding 
sorrow of the man and the tragedy of his 
life. At least I know I do not see those 
things. I see a pair of massive square-toed 
boots, such as Fm sure Father Abe never 
wore — he couldn't have worn 'em and 
walked a step — and I see a beegum hat 
weighing a ton and a half, and I say to my- 
self : ^^This is not the Abraham Lincoln who 
freed the slaves and penned the Gettysburg 
address. No, sir! A man with those legs 
would never have been president — he'd 
have been in a dime museum exhibiting his 
legs for ten cents a look — and they'd have 
been worth the money too." 

Nobody seems to have noticed it, but we 
undoubtedly had the cube form of expres- 
sion in our native sculpture long before it 
came out in painting. 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 109 

To get a better idea of what Fm trying 
to drive at, just take a trip up through Cen- 
tral Park the next time you are in New 
York and pause a while before those bronzes 
of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns 
which stand on the Mall. They are called 
bronzes, but to^me they always looked more 
like castings. I don't care if you are as 
Scotch as a haggis, I know in advance what 
your feelings will be. If you decide that 
these two men ever looked in life like those 
two bronzes you are going to lose some of 
your love and veneration for them right 
there on the spot; or else you are going to 
be filled with an intense hate for the persons 
who have libeled them thus, after they were 
dead and gone and not in position to pro- 
tect themselves legally. But you don't nec- 
essarily have to come to New York — 
you've probably got some decoration in your 
home town that is equally sad. ThereVe 
been a lot of good stone-masons spoiled in 
this country to make enough sculptors to go 
round. 

But while we are thinking these things 
about art and not daring to express them, I 



no Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

take note that new schools may come and 
new schools may go, but there is one class 
of pictures that always gets the money and 
continues to give general satisfaction among 
the masses. 

I refer to the moving pictures. 



Cobb's Bill-ofFare 



SPORT 




Cobb's Bill'of-Fare 



Sport 

AS I UNDERSTAND it, sport is hard 
/ \ work for which you do not get paid. 
JL l^If, for hire, you should consent to go 
forth and spend eight hours a day slamming 
a large and heavy hammer at a mark, that 
would be manual toil, and you would be- 
long to the union and carry a card, and have 
political speeches made to you by persons 
out for the labor vote. But if you do this 
without pay, and keep it up for more than 
eight hours on a stretch, it then becomes 
sport of a very high order — and if you con- 
tinue it for a considerable period of time, at 
more or less expense to yourself, you are 
eventually given a neat German-silver 
badge, costing about two dollars, which you 
treasure devotedly ever after. A man who 
walks twenty-five miles a day for a month 
without getting anything for it — except two 



114 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

lines on the sporting page — is a devotee of 
pedestrianism, and thereby acquires great 
merit among his fellow athletes. A man 
who walks twenty-five miles a day for a 
month and gets paid for it is a letter-carrier. 

Also sport is largely a point of view. A 
skinny youth who flits forth from a gymna- 
sium attired in the scenario of a union suit, 
with a design of a winged Welsh rarebit on 
his chest, and runs many miles at top speed 
through the crowded marts of trade, is high- 
ly spoken of and has medals hung on him. 
If he flits forth from a hospital somewhat 
similarly attired, and does the same thing, 
the case is diagnosed as temporary insanity 
— and we drape a strait-jacket on him and 
send for his folks. Such is the narrow mar- 
gin that divides Marathon and mania; and 
it helps to prove that sport is mainly a state 
of mind. 

I am speaking now with reference to our 
own country. Different nations have dif- 
ferent conceptions of this subject. Golf and 
eating haggis in a state of original sin are 
the national pastimes of the Scotch, a hardy 
race. At submarine boating and military 



Cobb's Bill-ofFare 115 

ballooning the French acknowledge no 
superiors. Their balloons go up and never 
come down, and their submarines go down 
and never come up. The Irish are born club 
swingers, as witness any police force; and 
the Swiss, as is well known, have no equals 
at Alpine mountain climbing, chasing 
cuckoos into wooden clocks, and running 
hotels. Fve always believed that, if the 
truth were only known, the reason why the 
Swiss Family Robinson did so well in that 
desert clime was because they opened a 
hotel and took in the natives to board. 

Among certain branches of the Teutonic 
races the favorite indoor sport is suicide by 
gas, and the favorite outdoor sport is going 
to a schutzenfest and singing Ach du lieber 
Augustin! coming home. To Italy the rest 
of us are indebted for unparalleled skill in 
eating spaghetti with one tool — they use the 
putting iron all the way round. Our cousins, 
the English, excel at archery, tea-drinking 
and putting the fifty-six pound protest. 
Thus we lead the world at contesting Olym- 
pian games and winning them, and they lead 
the world at losing them first and then con- 



116 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

testing them. In catch-as-catch-can wrest- 
ling between Suffragettes and policemen the 
English also hold the present championship 
at all weights. And so it goes. 

We in America have a range of sports and 
pastimes that is as wide as our continent, 
which is fairly wide as continents go. In 
using the editorial we here I do not mean, 
however, to include myself. At sport I am 
no more than an inoffensive onlooker. One 
time or another I have tried many of our 
national diversions and have found that 
those which are not strenuous enough are 
entirely too strenuous for a person of fairly 
settled habits. It is much easier to look on 
and less fatiguing to the system. I find that 
the best results along sporting lines are at- 
tained by taking a comfortable seat up in 
the grandstand, lighting a good cigar and 
leaning back and letting somebody else do 
the heavy work. Reading about it is also a 
very good way. 

Take fishing, now, for example. What 
can be more delightful on a bright, pleasant 
afternoon, when the wind is in exactly the 
right quarter, than to take up a standard 



Cobb's Bill'of-Fare 111 

work on fishing, written by some gifted 
traveling passenger agent, and with him to 
snatch the elusive finny tribe out of their 
native element, while the reel whirs deliri- 
ously and the hooked trophy leaps high in 
air, struggling against the feathered barb of 
the deceptive lure, and a waiter is handy if 
you press the button? I have forgotten the 
rest of the description; but any railroad line 
making a specialty of summer-resort busi- 
ness will be glad to send you the full details 
by mail, prepaid. In literature, fishing is 
indeed an exhilarating sport; but, so far as 
my experience goes, it does not pan out 
when you carry the idea farther. 

To begin with, there is the matter of 
tackle. Some people think collecting 
orchids is expensive — and I guess it is, the 
way the orchid market is at present; and 
some say matching up pearls costs money. 
They should try buying fishing tackle once. 
If J. Pierpont Morgan had gone in for fish- 
ing tackle instead of works of art he would 
have died in the hands of a receiver. Any 
self-respecting dealer in sporting goods 
would be ashamed to look his dependent 



118 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

family in the face afterward if he suffered 
you to escape from his lair equipped for 
even the simplest fishing expedition unless 
he had sawed off about ninety dollars' worth 
of fishing knickknacks on you. 

Let us say, then, that you have mortgaged 
the old home and have acquired enough 
fishing tackle to last you for a whole day. 
Then you go forth, always conceding that 
vou are an amateur fisherman who fishes for 
fun as distinguished from a professional 
fisherman who fishes for fish — and you get 
into a rowboat that you undertake to pull 
yourself and that starts out by weighing half 
a ton and gets half a ton heavier at each 
stroke. You pull and pull until your spine 
begins to unravel at both ends, and your 
palms get so full of water blisters you feel 
as though you were carrying a bunch of 
hothouse grapes in each hand. And after 
going about nine miles you unwittingly an- 
chor off the mouth of a popular garbage 
dump and everything you catch is second- 
hand. The sun beats down upon you with 
unabated fervor and the back of your neck 
colors up like a meerschaum pipe; and after 




'EVERYTHING YOU CATCH 
IS SECOND-HAND" 



Cobb's Bi //-of- Fare 121 

about ten minutes you begin to yearn with a 
great, passionate yearning for a stiff collar 
and some dry clothes, and other delights of 
civilization. 

If, on the other hand, I am being guided 
by an experienced angler it has been my ob- 
servation that he invariably takes me to a 
spot where the fish bit greedily yesterday 
and will bite avariciously tomorrow, but, 
owing to a series of unavoidable circum- 
stances, are doing very little in the biting 
line today. Or if by any chance they should 
be biting they at once contract an intense 
aversion for my goods. Others may catch 
them as freely as the measles, but toward me 
fish are never what you would call infec- 
tious. I'm one of those immunes. Or else 
the person in charge forgets to bring any 
bait along. This frequently happens when 
I am in the party. 

One day last summer I went fishing in the 
Savannah River, and we traveled miles and 
miles to reach the fishing-ground. We found 
the water there alive with fish, and anchored 
where they were thickest; and then the per- 
son who was guiding the expedition discov- 



122 Cobb'^s Bill'of'Fare 

ered that he had left the bait on the wharf. 
He is the most absent-minded man south of 
the Ohio anyhow. In the old days before 
Georgia went dry he had to give up carry- 
ing a crook-handled umbrella. He would 
invariably leave it hanging on the rail. So 
I should have kept the bait in mind myself 
— but I didn't, being engaged at the time in 
sun-burning a deep, radiant magenta. How- 
ever it was not a fast color — long before 
night it was peeling off in long, painful 
strips. 

Suppose you do catch something! You 
cast and cast, sometimes burying your hook 
in submerged debris and sometimes in ten- 
der portions of your own person. After a 
while you land a fish; but a fish in a boat 
is rarely so attractive as he was in a book. 
One of the drawbacks about a fish is that he 
becomes dead so soon — and so thoroughly. 

I have been speaking thus far of river 
fishing. I would not undertake to describe 
at length the joys of brook fishing, because 
T tried it only once. Once was indeed suffi- 
cient, not to say ample. On this occasion I 
was chaperoned by an old, experienced 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 123 

brook fisherman. I was astonished when I 
got my first view of the stream. It seemed 
to me no more than a trickle of moisture 
over a bed of boulders — a gentle perspira- 
tion coursing down the face of Nature, as it 
were. Any time they tapped a patient for 
dropsy up that creek there would be a de- 
structive freshet, I judged; but, as it devel- 
oped, this brook was deceptive — it was full 
of deep, cold holes. I found all these holes. 
I didn't miss a single one. While I was 
finding them and then crawling out of them, 
my companion was catching fish. He 
caught quite a number, some of them being 
nearly three inches long. They were 
speckled and had rudimentary gills and 
suggestions of fins, and he said they were 
brook trout — and I presume they were; but 
if they had been larger they would have 
been sardines. You cannot deceive me re- 
garding the varieties of fish that come in 
cans. I would say that the best way to land 
a brook trout is to go to a restaurant and 
order one from a waiter in whom you have 
confidence. In that way you will avoid 
those deep holes. 



124 Cobb's Bill-ofFare 

Nor have I ever shone as a huntsman. If 
the shadowy roeshad is not for me neither is 
her cousin, the buxom roebuck. Nor do I 
think I will ever go in for mounta-in-climb- 
ing as a steady thing, having tried it. Poets 
are fond of dwelling upon the beauties of 
the everlasting hills, swimming in purple 
and gold — but no poet ever climbed one. If 
he ever did he would quit boosting and start 
knocking. I was induced to scale a large 
mountain in the northern part of New York. 
It belonged to the state; and, like so many 
other things the state undertakes to run, it 
was neglected. No effort whatever had 
been made to make it cozy and comfortable 
for the citizen. It was one of those moun- 
tains that from a distance look smooth and 
gentle of ascent, but turn out to be rugged 
and seamy and full of rocks with sharp cor- 
ners on them at about the height of the aver- 
age human knee or shin. The lady for 
whom that mountain in Mexico, Chapulte- 
pec, is named — oh, yes. Miss Anna Peck — 
would have had a perfectly lovely time scal- 
ing that mountain ; but I didn't. 

After we had climbed upward at an acute 




" HE COULD BEAT ME CLIMBING, 

PUT AT PANTING I HAD HIM LICKED TO A WHISPER " 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 121 

angle for several hundred miles — my com- 
panion said yards, but I know better; it was 
miles — I threw myself prone upon the softer 
surfaces of a large granite slab, feeling that 
I could go no farther. I also wished to 
have plenty of room in which to pant. He 
could beat me climbing, but at panting I 
had him licked to a whisper. He was a 
person without sympathy. In his bosom the 
milk of human kindness had clabbered and 
turned to a brick-cheese. He stood there 
and laughed. There are times to laugh, but 
this was not one of the times. Anyway I al- 
ways did despise those people who are built 
like sounding boards and have fine acoustic 
qualities inside their heads — and not much 
of anything else; but never did I despise 
them more than at that moment. He sent his 
grating, raucous, discordant, ill-timed guf- 
faws reverberating ofif among the precipi- 
tous crags, and then he turned from me and 
went forging ahead. 

He was almost out of sight when I re- 
membered about there being bears on that 
mountain; so I rose and undertook to forge 
ahead too. I was not a great success at it 



128 Cobb's Btll-of-Fare 

however. I know now that if ever I should 
turn to a life of crime forgery would not be 
my forte. I do not forge readily. Eventu- 
ally, though, I reached the summit, he being 
already there. We had come up for the 
view, but I seemed to have lost my interest 
in views ; so, while he looked at the view, I 
reclined in a prostrate position and resumed 
panting. That was three years ago and I 
am still somewhat behind with my pants. 
I am going to take a week ofif sometime and 
pant steadily and try to catch up ; but the 
outing taught me one thing — I learned a 
simple way of descending a steep mountain. 
If one is of a circular style of construction 
it is very simple. One rolls. 

Camping is highly spoken of, and I have 
tried camping a number of times. When I 
go camping it rains. It begins to rain when 
I start and it keeps on raining until I come 
back. It never fails. I have often thought 
that drought-sufiferers in various parts of the 
country who seek to attract rain in dry spells 
make a mistake. They try the old-fashioned 
Methodist way of praying for it, or the new 
scientific way of shooting dynamite bombs 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 129 

off and trying to blast it out of the heavens ; 
when, as a matter of fact, the best plan 
would be to send for me and get me to go 
camping in the arid district. It would then 
rain heavily and without cessation. 

It is a fine thing to talk about the per- 
fumed and restful bed of balsam boughs, 
and the crackle of the campfire at dusk, and 
the dip in the mirrored bosom of the pel- 
lucid lake at dawn — old Emerson Hough 
does all that to perfection; but these things 
assume a different aspect when it rains. 
There are three conditions in life when any 
latent selfishness in a man's being, however 
far down it may be buried ordinarily, will 
come surging to the surface — when he is 
courting a girl against strong opposition; 
when he is playing a gentleman's game of 
poker, purely for sociability; and when he 
is camping out and it rains. Before a man 
makes up his mind that he will take a girl 
to be his wife he should induce her to go in 
surf bathing and see how she looks when she 
comes out; and before he makes up his mind 
that he will take a man to be his best friend 
he should go camping with him in the rainy 



130 Cobb^s Bill'of'Fare 

season — the answer in both cases being that 
then he won't do either one. 

I remember going camping once with a 
man who before that had appeared to be all 
that one could ask in the way of a chosen 
comrade; but after we had spent four days 
cooped up together in an eight-by-ten tent 
that was built with sloping shoulders, like 
an Englishman's overcoat, listening to the 
sough of the wind through the wet pine 
trees without, and dodging the streams of 
water that percolated through the dripping 
roof within, I could think of more than 
seven thousand things about that man that 
I cordially disliked. 

His whiskers gradually became the most 
distasteful of all to me. Either he hadn't 
brought a razor along or it was too wet for 
shaving — or something; and his whiskers 
grew out, and they were bristly and red in 
color, which was something I had not sus- 
pected before. As I sat there with the little 
rivulets running down the back of my neck 
and the rust forming on my amalgam fill- 
ings and mold on my shoes and mushrooms 
sprouting under my hatband, it seemed to 



CobPs Bill-of-Fare 131 

me that he had taken an unfair advantage 
of me by having red whiskers. Viewed 
through the drizzle they appeared to be the 
reddest, the most inflammatory, the most 
poisonous-looking whiskers I ever saw! 
They were too red to be natural. 

I decided finally that he must have been 
scared by a Jersey bull so that his whiskers 
turned red in a single night — and I was get- 
ting ready to twit him about it; but he beat 
me to it. It seemed that all this time he 
had been feeling more and more deeply of- 
fended at the way in which my ears were 
adjusted to my head. He couldn't make up 
his mind, he said, which way he would hate 
me more — with my ears or without them; 
but he was willing to take a butcher knife 
and experiment. He also said that, as an 
expert bookkeeper, he wouldn't know 
whether to enter my ears as outstanding 
losses or amounts brought forward. Going 
into those woods we were just the same as 
Damon and Pythias ; but coming out his bite 
would have been instant death, and I felt 
toward him exactly as the tarantula does 



132 Cobb^s Bill'of'Fare 

toward the centipede. We were the origi- 
nal Blue-Gum Twins. 

Coming now to aquatic sports as distin- 
guished from pastimes ashore, I feel that I 
am better qualified to speak authoritatively, 
having had more experience in that direc- 
tion. Let us start with canoeing. Canoeing 
is a sport fraught with constant surprises. A 
canoeing trip is rarely the same thing twice 
in succession; and particularly is this true 
in streams where the temperature of the 
water is subject to change. It is compara- 
tively easy to paddle a canoe if you only 
remember to scoop toward you. You merely 
reverse the process by which truly refined 
people imbibe soup. Even if you never 
master the art of paddling you may still get 
along fairly well if you know how to swim. 
On the whole I would say that one is liable 
to enjoy a longer career as a canoeist where 
one swims but can't paddle, than where one 
paddles but can't swim. 

Approaching the subject of motor-boat- 
ing as compared with sailboating, we find 
the situation becoming complicated and 
growing technical. In sailing, as is gener- 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 133 

ally known, you depend upon the wind; and 
there are only two things the wind does — 
one is to blow and the other is not to blow. 
But when you begin to figure up the things 
that a motor boat will do when you don't 
want it to, and won't do when you do want 
it to, you are face to face with one of 
the most complicated mathematical jobs 
known to the realm of mechanical science. 
A motor boat undoubtedly has a larger 
and fancier repertoire of cute tricks and un- 
expected ways than anything in the nature 
of machinery. I know this to be true, be- 
cause I have a relative who suffers from 
motor-boatitis in an advanced form. He has 
owned many different brands of motor boats 
— that is one reason, I think, why he is not 
wealthier; in fact he has had about all the 
kinds there are except a kind that will start 
when you wish it to and stop when you ex- 
pect it to. His motor boats do nearly every- 
thing — backfire, and fail to spark, and clog 
up, and blow up, and break down, and 
smash up and drift ashore, and drift out 
from shore, and have the asthma and the 
heaves and impediments of speech; but he 



134 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

has never yet owned one that could be de- 
pended upon to do the two things I have 
just mentioned. 

After trying various models and discard- 
ing them, he now has one of the most com- 
plete motor boats made. It has what is 
known as a hunting cabin, it being so called, 
I think, because the moment anybody gets 
into it he has to get out again while the 
owner crawls in and takes up all the seats 
and hunts for something. It is the theory 
that one could live afloat in this hunting 
cabin — and so one could if one were only 
a dachshund and inured to exposure. It is 
plenty wide enough for the average dachs- 
hund and plenty high enough, too, but not 
more than about two-thirds long enough. If 
one were a dachshund one would either 
have to coil up or else remain partly out- 
doors. Also, on board is a galley, which 
would be a success in every way if you could 
find a style of cook who could get used to 
sitting on one hole of the stove while he 
cooked on the other. One of those talented 
parlor magicians who does light housekeep- 
ing in a borrowed high hat by breaking raw 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 135 

eggs into it and then taking out omelet 
souffles, might fill the bill — only I never 
have chanced to see a parlor magician yet 
who could crowd himself and his feet into 
that galley at the same time. 

The principal feature of this motor boat, 
however, is the engine, which is a very com- 
plicated and beautiful thing, with coils and 
plugs and brakes strewed about over it here 
and there, and a big flywheel superimposed 
right in front. It is the theory that, by open- 
ing several cocks and closing several others, 
and adjusting about fifteen or twenty little 
duflickers just so, and then revolving this 
wheel briskly with a crank provided for that 
purpose, the engine can be started. It is 
supposed to say chug-chug a couple of times 
impatiently, and then go scooting away, 
chug-chugging like an inspired slide-trom- 
bone. 

Such is the theory, but such is not the fact. 
I've seen the owner crank her until his back- 
bone comes unjointed, without getting any 
response whatsoever. And then, just when 
he is about to succumb to hate and overexer- 
tion, the thing says tut-tut reprovingly — and 



136 Cobb's Bill'of'Fare 

then gives one tired pish and a low mourn- 
ful tush and coughs about a pint of warm 
gasoline into his face and dies as dead as 
Jesse James. I've seen her do that time 
and time again; but if she ever does start, 
the only way to stop her is to steer into some 
solid immovable object, such as the Western 
Hemisphere. 

At that, motor-boating for an amateur 
such as I am has certain advantages over 
sailboating. A motor-boatist — even the most 
reckless kind — knows enough to stay ashore 
when a West Indian hurricane is romping 
along the coast, playfully chasing its own 
tail like a young puppy; but that kind of a 
situation is just pie for your seasoned sail- 
boatist. 

Only last summer I had a very distressing 
experience in connection with a sailboat, 
which was owned by a friend of mine — or 
perhaps I should say he was a friend of 
mine until this matter came up. From the 
clubhouse porch I had often admired his 
boat skimming gracefully over the bay, 
with its sail making a white gore against the 
blue background; and one day he invited 




""ffiSSl^^- 



" SHE WAS NOT MUCH LARGER 
THAN A SOAPDISH" 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 139 

me to go out with him for a sail. Before I 
had time for that second thought which is so 
desirable under such circumstances, I found 
myself committed to the venture. 

Right here, though, I wish to state that if 
anybody ever gets me out in a small sailboat 
again it will be over my dead body. 

Well, anyway, we cast off, as he called it. 
I did not like that phrase — cast oflf — it 
sounded too much as though one were bid- 
ding farewell to all earthly ties — and almost 
immediately I was struck by other discon- 
certing facts. The first one was that his 
boat, which had looked roomy and commo- 
dious when viewed from shore, appeared to 
shrink up so when you were aboard her. 
Really, she was not much larger than a soap- 
dish and not nearly so reliable. And an- 
other thing I noticed was a lot of the angri- 
est-looking clouds that anybody ever saw, 
piling up on the horizon. And the waves 
were slopping up and down, and giving to 
the water that dark, forbidding appearance 
that is so inspiring in a marine painting, but 
so depressing when you are thrown into 
personal contact with it. 



140 Cobb's Bill -of- Fare 

I made a suggestion. As I recall now, I 
said something about waiting until the ty- 
phoon was over; but my friend grinned in 
an annoying, superior kind of way and said 
he doubted whether the wind would blow 
more than half a gale. He was right there 
— but it was the last half. Anyhow he 
swung her round and she heeled away over 
in an alarming fashion, and we headed right 
into the center of the vortex. He gave me 
the end of a rope to hold and told me to 
swing on to it, which I was very glad to do, 
because there are times and places when it 
gives you a slight sense of comfort to have 
anything at all to hold to, even if it is only a 
rope. On and on we careened madly. I 
was so occupied with barkening to the howl 
of the mad winds in the rigging and watch- 
ing the mad waves that, when he suddenly 
called out something which sounded like 
Hard Ah Lee, I paid no attention. If his 
fancy led him in a moment of dire peril like 
this to be yelling for somebody with a 
name like a Chinese laundryman, it was no 
concern of mine. 

Then he bellowed: ^^Leggo that sheet!" 



Cobb's Bi //-of- Fare 141 

Now I knew there was something about a 
sailboat called a sheet, but I naturally as- 
sumed it was the sail. I leave it to any 
disinterested person if a sail, being white 
and more or less square in shape, doesn't 
look more like a sheet than a mere rope 
does. So, as I wasn't near the sail, but was 
merely holding on to my rope, I started to 
tell him I wasn't touching his blamed old 
sheet. But the words were never spoken. 

The boat tried to shy out from under me 
and came very nearly succeeding. At the 
same time, she buckjumped and stood right 
up on one edge, like a demented gravy dish. 
At the same moment, also, a considerable 
portion of the Atlantic Ocean came aboard 
and lit in my lap, and something struck me 
alongside the head with frightful force; and 
something else scraped me off the place 
where I was sitting and hurled me head- 
long. 

When I came to, the man who owned the 
boat was scrambling round, stepping on me 
and my clothes, and grabbing at loose ends, 
and swearing; but as soon as he had a mo- 
ment to spare from these other duties he 



142 Cobb's Bi I /-of- Fare 

called me a derned idiot! I was his guest, 
mind you, and he used that language toward 
me. 

^Tfou derned idiot!" he said. ^^Didn't you 
see she was about to jibe?" 

I told him in a dignified manner that I 
certainly did not; that had I known she was 
about to jibe I would most certainly have 
jobe with her; that personally I preferred 
any amount of jibbing, however painful, to 
being drowned first and then beaten to 
death. I demanded to know why he had 
assaulted me upon the head and what he 
did it with. 

It developed, though, that he had not 
struck me at all. The boom swung round 
and hit me. This is a heavy section of lum- 
ber, and I think it is called a boom from the 
hollow, ringing sound it makes when dash- 
ing out the brains of amateur sailors. In 
my judgment these booms are dangerous and 
their presence should not be permitted 
aboard a sailing craft — or, at least, they 
should be towed a safe distance aft. 

But I digress. Referring to the devastat- 
ing and angry elements that encompassed us. 




"THINK OF BEING LAID FACE DOWN^VARD 

FIRMLY ACROSS A SINEAVY KNEE AND BEATEN FORTY-LOVE 

AVITH ONE OF THOSE HARD CATGUT RACKETS!" 



Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 145 

the owner of the boat said there was now a 
nice, fresh breeze blowing, and that he 
hated to miss the fun; but if I preferred to 
he would run back in and hug the shore. 
Hug it! I was ready to kiss it! What I 
wanted to do was to take that dear shore in 
both arms and press my throbbing cheeks 
against her mossy breast, and swear that 
nothing should ever again come between me 
and the solid part of the continent of North 
America. 

So, by a sheer miracle escaping death on 
the way, we returned, and I betook myself 
off of that craft and headed straight for the 
clubhouse. I wish to take advantage of 
this opportunity, however, to deny the re- 
port subsequently circulated by certain 
malicious persons to the effect that I was 
scared. Any passing agitation I may have 
betrayed was due to my relief at finding 
that the cyclone, despite its fury, had not 
swept the North Atlantic Coast bare. I 
also wish to deny the story that I was pale. 
I have one of those complexions that come 
and go. Anybody who knows me will tell 
you that. 



146 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

However, I have decided to give up sail- 
boating; and, to a person of my shape and 
conservative tendencies, this leaves the 
field of outdoor sport considerably circum- 
scribed. I am too peaceful for baseball and 
not warlike enough for football. I had 
thought some of taking up tennis, but have 
been deterred by the fact that so many young 
women excel at tennis. I could stand being 
licked by another man, but the idea of fac- 
ing one of those sinewy young-lady cham- 
pions whose stalwart face looks out at you 
from the sporting page is repellent to me. 

I can understand why so very few of these 
ultra-athletic college girls marry ofif early. 
A man instinctively is drawn to the cling- 
ing-vine type of female. If there is any 
sturdy oak round the place he wants to be it. 
But what I cannot understand is how these 
brawny young persons can be the grand- 
daughters and the great granddaughters 
of those fragile creatures, with wasp waists 
and tiny feet, who lived back in the 
Early Victorian period and suffered from 
megrims and vapors. I'll venture that 
none of this generation ever had a vapor in 



Cobb's Bi //-of- Fare 147 

her life; and as for megrims, she wouldn't 
know one if she met it in the big road. She 
may be muscle-bound and throw a splint 
sometimes, or get the Charley horse; but 
megrims are not for her — believe me! 

Oh, IVe seen them often — the adorable 
yet brawny creatures, leaping six feet into 
the air and smacking a defenseless tennis 
ball with such vigor that it started right ofif 
in the general direction of Sioux Falls at 
the rate of upwards of ninety miles an hour, 
and coming down flat-footed without hav- 
ing jostled so m.uch as a hairpin out of 
place. You may worship them, all right 
enough, but it is safer to do so at long dis- 
tance. 

Suppose you were hooked up for life to 
a lady champion and you happened to dis- 
please her? She'd spank you! Think of 
being laid face downward firmly across a 
sinewy knee and beaten forty-love with one 
of those hard catgut rackets! The very 
suggestion is intolerable to a believer in the 
supremacy of the formerly sterner sex. 

So I have decided not to take up tennis; 
but the doctor says I need exercise, and I 



148 Cobb's Bill-of-Fare 

think I will go in for golf, which is a young 
man's vice and an old man's penance. I 
have already taken the preliminary steps. 
I have joined a country club; I have also 
chosen my caddie. He is a deaf-and-dumb 
caddie, who has never been known to laugh 
at anything. 

That is why I chose him. 



^fij, 



V?3 



